Foglight Change Analyzer 5.8.3 - User Guide

Get started with Foglight Change Analyzer

Foglight® Change Analyzer allows you to track changes in your virtual environment and understand their potential impact on performance and availability. It captures and reports on changes to VMs, hosts, clusters, datastores, and resource pools within a selected environment. It also allows you to compare VMs to a “gold standard” VM or template and alerts you when changes cause their configurations to drift from the standard.

This guide provides information about Foglight Change Analyzer. Read it to acquire an overall understanding of the workings and capabilities of Foglight Change Analyzer and use it as a reference whenever you require specific information about this product. This guide is intended for IT managers who want to monitor virtual infrastructure changes and diagnose issues in the virtual environment.

This section introduces you to the Foglight Change Analyzer environment, and provides you with essential foundational information.

To get started with Foglight Change Analyzer see these topics:

This version of Foglight Change Analyzer works with Foglight for VMware. Support for additional virtualization environments will be added in future releases. For detailed information about the Foglight VMware® environment, see the Foglight for VMware User and Reference Guide.

Installation requirements

Foglight Change Analyzer comes installed on Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition or Foglight Evolve and can be installed on a Foglight Management Server.

Foglight Change Analyzer requires the following cartridges for data collection:

NOTE: After installing the Virtual-VMware-5_8_1.car cartridge, existing vCenter agents (VC agents) must be updated using the Update Agent button in the VMware Environment > Administration tab.

While Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition or Foglight Evolve comes with these cartridges pre-installed and enabled, a stand-alone Foglight release requires that these components be installed on the Foglight Management Server. The sequence of cartridge installation is important because of their dependencies.

For more information about installing Foglight Change Analyzer, and for details about system requirements and version compatibility, see the Foglight Change Analyzer Release Notes.

Credentials requirements

Foglight Change Analyzer provides recommendations for changes in the VMware® environment to make more efficient use of resources. As a prerequisite, a VMware agent must be configured with a user that has elevated privileges, beyond the read-only privileges required for monitoring.

For a list of privileges required for the VMware agent, see section “Configuring Monitoring Agents for Data Collection” in the Foglight for VMware User and Reference Guide.

To review the permissions each user/group has for a selected object, see Users and Permissions.

Data collection

The Change Analyzer dashboard automatically displays the virtual machine hosts (VMware® target machines) that Foglight, Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition, or Foglight Evolve monitors, for which recommendations are provided. No further setup is required.